Daniella Malin

While serving as Senior Program Director for Agriculture and Climate at the Sustainable Food Lab, Daniella co-founded the Cool Farm Tool and its home, the Cool Farm Alliance, a leading industry platform for quantifying agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, soil carbon sequestration, and other sustainability metrics. Daniella saw early on that if society was to realize the climate change mitigation potential available through agriculture, the world was going to need a standardized tool that would engage actors all along the supply chain, help build action plans, motivate, encourage, and reward good practice, and build bridges of communication and learning across sectors – from the board room to the farmer’s field, from the ivory tower to the halls of government. The Cool Farm Alliance is now its own legal entity, a not-for-profit membership organization (community interest company) that owns, manages, and improves the Cool Farm Tool and cultivates the leadership network to advance regenerative agriculture at scale. 

Daniella takes a collaborative approach to her work, drawing together the kinds of partnerships, alignments and collaborations among diverse stakeholders to co-build and co-benefit from mutually reinforcing solutions. 

In addition to working with food and beverage companies on their climate mitigation and regenerative agriculture strategies and programs, Daniella also now serves as Head of Impact and Collaboration for the Cool Farm Alliance, having previously led and/or overseen all aspects of the development of the Cool Farm Tool and Cool Farm Alliance including the science and methodology, documentation, governance, software design and testing, project management, communications, training, stakeholder engagement and facilitation, fundraising, piloting the use of the tool in supply chains with farmers, case study development and strategic partnerships. 

Her love of soil carbon as an engine of ecological (including human) restoration drives much of her work. This topic, as it touches on the biology of soil, the economics of farming, technology, culture, science, and more, serves as a practical medium through which to address one of the greatest crises/opportunities of our time and a reminder of the connectedness of all things.

Previously Daniella served as project manager for the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows and the Responsible Commodities Initiative, a project to create a global roundtable of commodity roundtables. Prior to joining the Sustainable Food Lab, Daniella wrote software for the world’s largest millimeter telescope, worked as a farmer and farm/wilderness educator and was a newspaper reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  Daniella received her B.A. in Literature and Society from Brown University and lives in Vermont with her husband and two wonderous children.